#inquiry

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer. ↗

— E. L. Doctorow

#aspirations #began #book #child #done

I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#america #become #book #criminal #i

God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#free-inquiry #humanism #science #faith

The most all penetrating spirit before which will open the possibility of tilting not tables, but planets, is the spirit of free human inquiry. Believe only in that. ↗

— Dmitri Mendeleev

#believe #free #human #inquiry #most

Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry. ↗

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

#believe #both #cases #creed #ever